There are heating elements in the market incorporated into systems for warming medical peripherals. However, those heating elements are powered by battery/electricity and impact the system's battery life. For example, to meet the needs of the most demanding heating applications, a comprehensive custom heating pad design and manufacturing service is offered by electro-mechanical thermal management specialist ACAL Radiatron™. The capability has been further expanded with the introduction of high power density printed-element heater pads operating at temperatures up to 650° C. and ‘smart’ self-regulating heater mats for lower temperatures.
Other examples include, using flexible portfolios of material and manufacturing technology options, fabricating heating pads to custom specifications ensuring best-in-class thermal performance as cost-effectively as possible. A joint-development approach to achieve optimum design solutions often brings value-added benefits due to a company's wide-ranging capability coupled with extensive and proven expertise. This philosophy repeatedly delivers the right product with the right price at the right time.
New applications continue to emerge every day. Typically, pads, mats and heating elements are used for surface heating in food processing, catering/medical equipment and similarly diverse applications. In outdoor cold-weather applications, the pads are used in areas such as condensation protection in system enclosures of all kinds, from telecoms base-stations to point-of-sale and remote systems requiring stable operating temperatures. As equipment generally becomes smaller and more compact, and as power consumption issues concern designers, the pads are proving increasingly popular as wafer-thin space-saving alternative to cumbersome air-conditioning units, for example.
The pads can be produced in virtually any shape or form and may be flexible or rigid depending on end-user needs. With extremely low thermal mass, they can be designed to offer fast-acting or steady heat-flow evenly distributed right across the pad surface avoiding excessive thermal gradients, cold spots or can be zoned into selective areas. To achieve this, the company can exploit a range of separate element technologies and dielectric materials. These include fixed resistance etched foils, resistive wire or variable resistance conductive inks and alloys depending on power density, size and volume requirements. Printed directly onto steel or ceramic gives the lowest mass and high temperature performance. Other dielectrics include silicone rubber (to 260° C.), polyimide (Kapton) (to 200° C.), polyester (to 120° C.). They are typically supplied with connection wiring to suit individual needs and are subsequently temperature controlled by switching circuitry such as bi-metal thermostats or solid-state NTC's.
In addition, self-regulating heat pads are offered which change their resistance in proportion to the surrounding ambient temperature—so the colder it becomes the harder the heater works. They are manufactured using a specialized PTC polymer printed ink element which features interleaved bus bar technology to produce multiple parallel circuits across its surface. Ideal for lower temperature start up, anti-condensation or defrost requirements—examples include self-governing automotive, scientific and industrial heating requirements. The pads respond quickly to ambient temperature variations to cost-effectively maintain an optimized and regular operating temperature, typically from −60° C. to 70° C.
Notably absent from the prior art, as well, are devices that are suitable for medical professionals to use to gather and store physical data from patients—vital signs, photographs, etc. and store the data in a convenient, tablet-style device. Such devices should offer wireless data acquisition, data storage, and the processor capacity to run a powerful, flexible operating system in a durable, ergonomic form factor capable of withstanding exposure to liquids and other environmental factors. To accommodate the needed processing power, the device should also be capable of dissipating the heat generated by modern central processing units without causing discomfort to the user or requiring a chassis having large, inconvenient heat sinks or vents that might permit the device to be contaminated or damaged by liquids or high-humidity environments.